I built a personal finance dashboard to help people keep track of their expenses. Here's why I split it into two backends, and the CORS issue that taught me more than the rest of the project combined.
This finance dashboard is really helpful for users to keep track of their expenses. All you have to do is add your budget for your needs, that's it, you can relax now. When you start spending money, just let the finance dashboard know where and how much you are spending. Take a look at the finance dashboard at the end of the month to see where you spent the most and where you saved money. This product helps people be more careful and aware of their spending. It is mainly for young people who are just starting to spend their own money.
The Architecture
The finance dashboard has two backends: a Node and Express server that handles adding expenses, deleting them, and setting budgets, and a Python and FastAPI server that handles all the analysis and chart data. Both backends connect to the same MongoDB Atlas database.
I chose to use two languages because each one is good at different things. Node and Express are great for simple tasks like adding an expense or deleting an entry i.e. things where you want it to happen quickly and don't need a lot of computation. Express handles this with minimal overhead.
